USAID’s 10,000-plus former staffers are vying for just 300 new roles at the State Department — a process that one current USAID employee called “shady, rushed, and back-handed” due to the lack of clarity around specific roles, a reliance on internal referrals, and a compressed timeline that gives staffers until just 5 p.m. tonight to submit their applications.
“It’s like we’re back in the 19th century and I want a job at their father’s company,” the staffer told Devex on Monday morning. “No, thank you.”
The open roles are divided across several parts of the State Department, the federal agency that will subsume what little is left of the U.S. Agency for International Development by this July. Over the last three business days, the department has held virtual meetings on the upcoming roles — and in the third and final session on Monday morning, candidates were told they had less than seven hours to apply.
About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
